It is frustrating to work in an office you do not feel passionate about. The problem is that you love what you do. It is not easy to earn your own office with all the necessary team and staff. So, most of the young architects go for the lean startup process. The process is simple.
A. Work part-time from home after office.
B. Work full-time from home quitting office.
C. Take a small office with your first partner or employee.
D. Build your firm.
The process usually takes Three to Four years. During this time, we need small and medium-range projects to save us from not drowning. #Freelancing websites are one of the greatest sources of generating new leads for architects and interior designers. Here are the top five.
01. Upwork
Upwork is a merged company of former tow giant platforms, oDesk and Elance. It does seem like Upwork is not accepting new freelancers from Bangladesh but if you are skilled and organized, give it a try. It has a neat interface and lots of solid client groups that can easily help you to get long term engagements.
Fees: You need to buy Connects to apply for the jobs. Usual monthly expense 15$/moth for individual and 25$/month if you run as an Agency.
They also take 20% of your income under 500$,
10% when above and
5% after 10k+.
Another great platform to receive projects from Europe based clients is People Per Hour or PPH. Highly curated website to make sure every job and every freelancer has some minimum quality. You will be able to receive payments in USD, Pound and Euro which will stay like that in your account. I like the feature of earning different currencies.
They give 15 free job proposal opportunities every month and you can always buy more. And this is how they take from your percentage.
Fiverr is a gig-based interesting and highly popular platform with lots of regular clients. I personally found lots of big clients who ended up making long term business relation with us. Fiverr is a perfect platform for fresh new startups as they do not need lots of formalities to get started as a freelancer.
However, they pretty shamelessly takes 20% money from every earning you make, even from the Tips.
04. Guru
Guru was one of my most favorite freelancing platforms once. The only problem is that they do not have enough clients for Architects. However the problem is solved if you find clients from other places like Linkedin or Facebook and bring them here. Guru has a different choice of membership plans which will help you to choose how much you want to pay to them.
05. Freelancer One of the oldest giants. I did not want to put them in the number Five but due to the extreme level of competition it has and asking money for almost everything they do is a huge problem for fresh architects to join this platform. Also another painful thing is not to have a Payoneer account withdrawal service for Bangladeshi freelancers. Freelancer does have a huge number of clients. Possibly the highest on the planet? So if you do some tricks and keep trying, this can be great too. Freelancer also has a pretty good number of packages that fits your need. I think they have the best price packages. And regarding project fees, it is fixed 10%. However, the fixed price project has a minimum fee of 5$.
However, there are tons of other websites that also do the similar services. But do some research because there are lots of scammers and spammers. I have also showed a live demonstration of how each website looks like and a little more glimpse of pros and cons. Take a look and if you have any questions, please comment below.